PYLON and the Future of Privacy Laws

It’s probably just my age, but it feels like we are living in a time of rapid technological advancement. Things are changing so fast in the world of mobile, social and the sharing economy that it can be difficult for an old codger like me to keep up. Well, if you think it’s hard for an individual to stay current, how must it be for governments? It must be like a game of legislative whack-a-mole.

One area that has generated a lot of interest over recent years is privacy. Consumers the world over have been expressing concerns about the way that data is collected from them, used and stored as they interact with businesses online, post to social media and use apps. Legislators the world over are slowly (but surely) working to address those concerns.

The European Union has been at the forefront of privacy regulation for many years and is in the process of finalising its next phase of legislation, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which is expected to come into force in 2018. This regulation has taken years to pull together and will not only unify the law across all 27 countries in the EU, but also looks to address the changes in technology since the directive that it replaces was drawn up in the 1990s.

At DataSift we have also been working to address privacy concerns, which is why we developed PYLON. PYLON is built with “privacy by design” and incorporates a number of features that mean that insights can be drawn from social data without infringing on people’s privacy. So far we have applied this technology to Facebook topic data, but we see this technology (and others like it) being the future of the social data industry. The latest EU regulation only confirms that view.

If you’d like to read more about how PYLON for Facebook Topic Data and EU Data Protection then take a look at this white paper from the law firm, Orrick. If you’d like to read the draft of the GDPR, then it is available here – but be warned, it’s 200 pages long!